Deborah Woehr

Ben has tagged me with this meme. It’s a rather difficult one. If you read the list, you’ll know why.

The Rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their 8 things and post these rules.
3. At the end choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

Eight random things about me

1. I broke my wrist while standing on the sidewalk in a brand new pair of skates, talking with my little brother. One of my feet gave out from under me, and I landed hard. Needless to say, I never wore that pair of skates again. It was a long time before I put on another pair of skates.
2. I hate wearing dresses because I have to wear panty hose and heels. I’m most comfortable in a pair of jeans and a T-Shirt.
3. I love having a slew of projects to work on at the same time.
4. I’m organized at work, but live in organized chaos.
5. I don’t need to get drunk to make a fool of myself. This quality has both positive and negative ramifications.
6. I tend to disappear in a crowded room.
7. I make a lousy first impression in job interviews because I feel that my skills have no real value. Therefore, when the interviewer says, “Tell me about yourself,” I stammer out whatever comes to mind, which usually isn’t much.
8. Today, I found out how much my co-workers care about me when I told them that my doctor thought I had a blood clot in my leg. I hope to keep in touch with these people when this contract ends.

There you have it. Eight random facts about me. Consider yourself tagged.

Hello, Everyone!

I’m looking at the date of my last post on here and am shaking my head. I can’t believe we’re halfway through May already. Last weekend, I had to work on Saturday. When I got home, I decided to upload some more of the old posts onto The Writers Buzz and got locked out by my host’s firewall. That’s since been fixed (I think), but now I’m paranoid about uploading too many posts at once. The techie told me it had something to do with the mod security rules, whatever that means.

I set that aside and started working on Prosperity. That’s still going well. I’m hopeful of sending the manuscript to a professional editor by the end of July.

In the meantime, my husband is planning our vacations. Today, we’re going to Yosemite, which reminds me that I need to bring some fresh batteries for the digital camera. I’ll post some pics here, if I can get some good shots.

The second trip is a biggie. We’ll be flying out to Philadelphia to visit my husband’s grandfather. Then we’ll be visiting Washington D.C. (something I’ve always wanted to do) and ending the trip in Austin (to visit my family). I should have a boatload of pics from that trip.

I finally got around to publishing last year’s vacation, using Lulu’s Photo Book project. The results weren’t too bad, but I found myself limited design-wise. I’ll post more about that on my Lulu blog, when I get the chance. This has inspired me to research for another book project, which I’ll be launching shortly after I finish Prosperity. Stay tuned for more news about that.

In the meantime, I’m going to get out of the house and spend the weekend with my family. I hope you all have a wonderful Mother’s Day!

I read an article that stunned me this morning, called What Credit Card Companies Don’t Want You to Know. David Bach discusses the universal debt clause and how credit card companies use it to hike your interest rates to the point where you can’t pay off your balances. If you’ve never heard of this clause before now, I suggest you read this article. Then follow up with research on the subject.

So many people have complained about their credit card companies that Congress is looking into it.

This is an actual rainbow, taken by an 85 year-old artist/photographer, who happened to step outside during a party on January 13th. There is a fancy term for this type of rainbow, but I’ll let you read the article. These types of rainbows are extremely rare, especially here in the Bay Area.

And, because the link to the article will disappear sometime soon (they always do), I will post another link to a site which has pictures of strange weather phenomenon.

We’ve all had at least one during our school days. During the last week of school last year, my oldest son and I saw this parent picketing next to the parking lot entrance. I rolled my eyes as I drove into the entrance to drop him off. Because the parents do not know how to drive through a parking lot (I’m not kidding.), I got to actually read this guy’s sign as I was sitting there with my engine idling.

He had tacked a picture of the eighth grade science teacher, along with a short bar graph of the percentage of kids who failed her class that year. In hindsight, I wish I had parked my car on a side street and gone up to talk to him about this teacher. If I had, I would have marched into the administration office and changed my son’s school schedule right then because he got stuck with this woman.

I won’t go into the gory details except to say that the majority of the kids in her class, including my son, are failing or are barely passing. The school district knows this woman is a loser but can’t (or won’t) fire her. My son has been teetering on failing all semester.

His final is coming up on Wednesday. I’m hoping and praying that he passes this well enough to keep his D- grade. If he does, he’ll be rid of her and moving on to technical drafting class he signed up for. If he doesn’t, he may get stuck with another semester with her.

Keep your fingers crossed, send good vibes, etc. I’ll keep you posted.

How old were you when you decided that trick-or-treating was uncool? I was 15 and would have gone out again if another girl hadn’t ruined my fun by saying, “Aren’t you a little old for that?” I swear, some people can be such killjoys.

Both my kids decided that they didn’t want to wear a costume or go trick-or-treating this year, which is highly unusual because both of them have a healthy sweet tooth. There was no particular reason. They just didn’t want to go. So I shrugged my shoulders and brought out a gingerbread haunted house kit to assemble and decorate.

I figured that if we weren’t going to do the trick-or-treat thing, we could start a new tradition. It sounded like a good idea until I tried to put the thing together. Did I tell you that I’ve never attempted to make one of these things before? I did manage to get the sides and most of the roof glued together with frosting, although the walls liked to slide around.

Then I set the boys loose on it. About a minute passed before the oldest cried out, “You broke the house!”

“No, I didn’t!” the youngest argued.

Uh-oh, I thought before I returned to the dining room to assess the damage. The house was totaled. Not a single wall stood. Frosting smeared every surface. My youngest cheerfully munched on one of the walls and proclaimed that the cookie was too hard.

Our haunted house project got scrapped and sent to the garbage can outside before our resident rat (who we’ve yet to banish and/or kill) can have a midnight snack.

I hope you all have/had a delightful Halloween!

A book marketing plan is an outline that will help you determine where and how you will promote your book. It can also serve as an indicator of how well your book may do in the market, once you publish it.

Ideally, you should draw up this plan well before you send your manuscript to a traditional or POD publisher. Today, many publishers require writers to submit a marketing plan along with their queries.

The problem is, many writers have no clue as to how they’re going to market their books. Often, they publish and hope for the best. The information below is a template that will guide you through the process of creating your first book marketing plan.

1. Your Target Audience: Who is going to read your book? Find out what kinds of books are the most popular in your genre and why. What makes your book stand out from the throng of books currently on the market? Have you tested your book’s idea with prospective readers to determine their interest?

2. The Product: What kind of book have you (or are about to) published? Is it a romance novel or a how-to book on underwater basket-weaving? Will it be available in other formats such as an ebook, podcast, CD-Rom, etc.?

At this stage in your marketing plan, you will need to research your competition to find out what the latest marketing trends are and how to use them to your advantage. You’ll also find out how well your competition is doing. Are their books (and derivative versions) selling like hotcakes or are they struggling to make a single sale?

3. The Price: Research your market to find out what readers are willing to pay for your book’s genre. Where are you going to sell it?

4. The Packaging: Decide how you’re going to design your book cover and marketing materials. Consistency and good design are critical. Again, research your competition to see what their materials like.

How does the design and copy measure up? Both play an equally important job in attracting the reader. How are you going to improve on what they did?

5. Promotion and Publicity: How are you going to promote your book? Where are you going to promote it? Take this time to research every available resource both online and off. Write them down or enter them into a database. Creating and keeping a database is the better option because you can set up columns to track your progress.

Once you have gathered all of this information, you are ready to create your book marketing plan. If you are going to submit this plan to a prospective publisher, make sure to follow their guidelines, if necessary. Otherwise, you can type everything into a report and print it out for future reference.

I’ve read countless posts in forums and blogs where writers talk about the dreaded writer’s block, publishing nightmares (traditional and POD), etc. On occasion, I’ll hear writers moan or rejoice about their latest book signing(s). What I don’t hear much about is how they market their books once they’re published.

I found a couple of great books on book marketing: Francine Silverman’s Book Marketing from A-Z and Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing for Writers. Over the next several months, I’ll be testing out their resources and tips, plus whatever resources I find on the Internet. Then I’ll post the results here.

Thanks to all of you who responded to my Lulu series. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it so far and hope it helps you if you decide to publish through this company. I’ll be taking a break from it for a couple of days because I’ve come down with a bad headcold. Once my head clears and I can think again, I’ll continue.

Sean McCarthy of Dublin has developed a free energy technology that can power everything from cars to cell phones. This technology involves the interaction of magnetic fields and can generate five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size, without having to recharge.

At this time, 420 scientists across the globe have submitted an application to test this technology for themselves. Another 4,606 people have registered to receive the results of this testing.

Source: UK News